Monday, October 12, 2015

Doing it right

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in August 2002)

Well into
the new film Tadpole, the 15-year-old
protagonist makes a move on his 40-something stepmother, played by Sigourney
Weaver. When I saw the film, a man in the audience who’d so far been sitting
quietly exploded in disgust: “Filthy pervert,” he spat out. Well, everyone has
to draw the line somewhere, but that seemed to me a fairly arbitrary place to
do it. Remember how Woody Allen answered the question of whether sex is dirty
by saying it is if you do it right. Tadpole
doesn’t seem very dirty, which in this case is a sign it’s not doing it right (with
due apologies to the sensibility of the offended gentleman, whom I assume would
dissent from this view).

Tadpole

It’s an
American movie, set in New York’s Upper East Side, but it seems to wish it were
French. The 15-year-old (nicely played by Aaron Sanford) is a Voltaire buff who
speaks French whenever circumstances allow, and the approach of a civilized,
quizzical attitude to mildly transgressive material evokes French directors
like Truffaut and Malle.

A couple
of days before I saw Tadpole, I was
watching Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee
at the Cinematheque – another film in which a middle-aged protagonist flirts with
a teenager. I guess you could call that character a filthy pervert too, but
Rohmer’s always been excellent at allowing his characters’ delusions about
themselves to condition the audience’s sense of them. Anyway, nothing much
happens in Rohmer’s film, physically speaking, and I doubt that many would
think it dirty, but it’s quintessentially French. Tadpole’s instincts are a little broader and coarser than Rohmer’s
(aren’t everyone’s?), but I think in many ways director Gary Winick would be
delighted if his movie left the same kind of after-effect.

On the
other hand, I recall that in Arthur Penn’s Night
Moves, Rohmer was the recipient of Gene Hackman’s put-down about how
watching his films is like watching paint dry. Delicacy is a tricky business. Tadpole lasts only 77 minutes – short enough
to threaten its very commercial viability. Even at that length, the movie seems
rather repetitive and occasionally strained. It does convey a certain
intellectual prowess, but whereas in Rohmer’s movies the erudition is seeped
into the celluloid, in Tadpole it
seems like something pasted on. For example, the film contains “chapter
headings,” taken mostly if not entirely from Voltaire I think, along the lines
of: “Reason consists of always seeing things as they are,” and “If we don’t
find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.” These all seemed
to me either too obvious or else completely inscrutable.

Most
puzzling of all, the movie has no ending. In Claire’s Knee, the ending serves as proof of Rohmer’s discernment. Tadpole reaches its inevitable decision
point, and then fizzles completely. I said Tadpole
doesn’t seem very dirty, but there’s one exception – the title itself – with its
vague connotations of reproductive biology and vague double-entendre.
Ultimately though, it’s the word’s squelchy immaturity that seems most
relevant.

I should
say that the movie seems American in one way at least – the vague sense of Wes
Anderson around the edges. I’m gradually concluding that the director of Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums is the most influential figure of his generation.
At one point Sanford, finding out that Elvis had a teenage Elvis crush, makes
himself a pair of fake sideburns out of dog hair. There’s a deadpan incongruity
to the incident that seems inescapably Andersonian now.

Never Again

I didn’t mean to suggest by the way that dirty
equals good, although I do have a sneaking affection for the Carry On series (Benny Hill never did
much for me though). If that were in doubt, there’s a bizarre new project called
Never Again, which filters some of
the raunchiest material in memory through the medium of…uh…esteemed actress
Jill Clayburgh. In particular, she has one extended scene with a sex toy that…well,
you’d have to see it for yourself. Or rather, you should take my word for it
that you don’t need to see it for
yourself.

Clayburgh
plays a 54-year-old divorcee who hasn’t had sex in a decade and is desperate to
turn that around. Jeffrey Tambor is a guy in the same boat, on such a sexual
losing streak that he thinks he might be homosexual. They meet at a gay bar,
start having hot sex while insisting they’ll avoid love. But hey, it ain’t so
easy.

I swear I
don’t have anything against 54-year-old people having sex (I hope to be in that
situation myself one day). And Never
Again’s unabashed randiness is a distinct improvement over the dreary
pseudo-philosophizing of the recent vastly overpraised Innocence. But the movie feels fake and artificial, stuffed with
elements you could basically have ticked off a checklist (Clayburgh’s
college-age daughter catching them in the act; the life-threatening accident
that befalls one of the two; the background chatter of Clayburgh’s like-minded
group of friends). Although Michael McKean’s performance as a transsexual prostitute
is beyond anyone’s imagination, even after you’ve seen it.

The film
seems to think itself brave and daring, but that’s just another way of being
evasive. It never shows us what the relationship consists of – we get the ups
and downs and the sex, but none of the necessary stuff in between. And it has
an extremely programmatic view of human relationships; would anyone analyze
himself as being gay if he didn’t feel it? Maybe in your 50s you lose touch
with yourself more than I can currently anticipate. Tambor is only marginally
persuasive, but Clayburgh actually turns in a fine performance. Which in the
circumstances may be even more impressive than her achievement in An Unmarried Woman.

Intimacy

Last
year, there was a fair bit of hubbub about a film called Intimacy, which supposedly represents a step forward in
straightforwardly depicting adult sexuality. I say supposedly because I haven’t
seen it – it wasn’t at last year’s festival and it hasn’t opened commercially
here. Apparently no distributor was interested in it (the video/DVD release
must be imminent). I don’t want to over-analyze one economic decision, but it
seems that English-language movies are still doing everything possible with the
subject of sex, except staring at it straight on.

Foreign
movies avoid this – take for example the recent Israeli film Late Marriage. But on the whole, whether
you’re 15 and doing it with a 40-year-old or whether you’re a hot-blooded
54-year-old doing it with a contemporary, you’re not likely to find much of a
mirror in the movies. However, if you’re a 54-year-old male who’s had some work
done, doing it with a 25-year-old model in a soft-focus world….

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).